Mirror Mirror

Oh, what a difference a year makes.  I started this blog just a little over a year ago with great intentions regarding consistent posts and emotional transparency as a part of my healing and growth.  A couple months later I was still writing but stopped posting because this emotional transparency was just too hard.  Fast forward a few more months and the writing ended altogether, my mind too mottled a place even for myself.  My life is entirely different now than it was a year ago.  It's not any better or worse, just changed.  Even though I haven't maintained it, I'm thankful for this blog - it's important for me to be able to look back and see how the world looked through the eyes of who I was.

Survival has been the ever-running theme in my life and I suspect always will be to some degree.  I wrote once that what nobody ever tells you about survival is that you don't get to choose the part of you which survives.  When your one and only concern, your driving force, is simply to make it to the next moment, it doesn't matter what part of yourself you have to sacrifice to get there.  This is absolutely true, and a little terrifying at times.  What is equally true and exponentially more exciting is the fact that you do get to choose how to rebuild.  When you stop surviving and start living you get the wonderful ability to assess the pieces left behind and create something beautiful out of them as a foundation for tomorrow.

The first step in assessment is definition.  Looking back on the Julie of a year ago I remember clear definitions of self.  I was defined by being a survivor of melanoma.  I was defined by being my best friend's...best friend.  I was defined by being a Christian.  I was defined by BPD.  I was defined by surviving sexual assault.  I was so weighted down by these definitions and the responsibility each one brought I couldn't move.  It took stripping myself of all these labels to catch a glimpse of who I actually am.

Descartes asserted that in order to know anything, you must question everything.  He even went so far as to question his own reality.  When a friendship dissolves after spending nearly a decade viewing it as an integral part of your identity, questioning your own reality isn't such a stretch.  When your faith has so long been a defining characteristic in your life and you suddenly find yourself questioning what you believe and how it all fits into your life, what is real?  The people you would normally talk to hinge all their answers on a faith you're not sure you have so you just go deeper inside yourself to the place where loneliness becomes comfortable solitude.  In solitude definitions don't matter, it's just you and your mirror.

My mirror showed me a broken girl with the strength to make something out of the shards.  I am no longer defined by illness, sexual assault or anyone around me.  These things did take pieces of me which are irreplaceable, but that doesn't mean I can't be whole.  I think that's where I got tripped up for so long, I wanted my foundation to look the way I thought it would had these pieces remained.  A different shape doesn't make it any less stable, just more...interesting.  Imagine what can rise from such a foundation.